A Visit to Sea Center Texas at Lake Jackson

In the late 1970s the Texas Red Drum population was on the brink of collapse due to low regulation and commercial overfishing. Non-profits like GCCA (now CCA), recreational anglers, and TPWD Coastal Fisheries advocated for protecting the red Drum. In 1977 the first step was taken in the Red Drum Act which classified Red Drum as a game species and set recreational and commercial limits. The 1981 Red Drum Bill also known as HB1000 strengthened the regulations and banned gill nets. With this momentum, the GCCA, CPL, and Texas established the first saltwater fish hatchery, the John Wilson Fish Hatchery in Flour Bluff, in 1982. In 1983 the hatchery released its first 2.3 million Red Drum fingerlings into the local bays. In 1984 the John Wilson Hatchery added Speckled Trout to the program. A decade later the Perry R. Bass Marine Hatchery was opened, just as DOW Chemical, GCCA, and TPWD announced that they would partner together to build the largest and most state-of-the-art Red Drum hatchery in the world in Lake Jackson.

What do they do?

Sea Center Texas opened its visitor center in 1996 to promote education and conservation along the Texas coast. Sea Center is open six days a week to the public with free admission, and hatchery tours can be scheduled if you call and make arrangements in advance of your visit. Inside there is a replica of every saltwater state record fish, a touch tank where kids can interact safely with many bay species.         

Public fishing events are held three times a year in February, June and September for 16 and under. If you are a new angler or are raising one there are also several Intro to Fishing Basics classes offered during the year. The Sea Center also hosts 5 major events: Nature Day, Shark Week, Bull Red Run-A Palooza, Sea Center Spooktacular, and Christmas with the Fishes. Nature Day has the goal of introducing the public to the Houston area environmental organizations. Shark Week is a two-day celebration held each year with guest speakers and complete with a real shark encounter. A Sea Center Spooktacular is for the ghouls and goblins to enjoy. They are also paid a visit by Santa during Christmas with the Fishes event.

I met up with Paul Cason in September for a Hatchery Tour during Sea Centers’ 3^rd annual Bull Red Run-A-Palooza event. All generations of anglers were greeted at the gate where Paul, the staff, and volunteers setup learning stations. Each station covered an era in Red Drum conservation efforts by TPWD and their partners up to the present day. After which the kids were able to go fishing in the brood ponds for some catch and release fun with big bull reds.

Red Drum and Speckled Trout

“The hatchery is active year-round, Red Drum and Speckled Trout being produced in the spring through fall,” Paul said as we walked into the first of two spawning tank areas. “In the wild, redfish spawn only in the fall. In the hatchery we adjust the water temp and duration of light to simulate the seasons in the tanks,” he added. “Doing it this way allows TPWD to have eggs available on demand. It takes roughly 150 days for a ‘year’ to pass and the brood stock to spawn in the tanks. Redfish eggs float. In the wild, as redfish become adults, they leave the protection of the bays and live the remainder of their lives in Gulf of Mexico. During the fall, they congregate around gulf passes to spawn. The fertilized eggs rely on the tide and good luck to end up back in the bays. There they spend their juvenile years. In captivity, the eggs are collected by a skimmer, like on a swimming pool, and TPWD technicians and biologists collect the eggs and transfer them to an incubation area.”

Each spawning tank holds five adult redfish, three females and two males. The morning I arrived a biologist had collected over 300,000 eggs. “By noon on Saturday, these will be in a larval stage. By Monday they will be large enough for us to transfer to the stock ponds,” Paul said. “After 30-35 days TPWD staff drain the pond and collect the fingerlings in fish hauling trailers. The fish-hauling trailers are then transported and emptied in various stocking locations along the Upper Texas Coast. During the peak of operation, Sea Center can harvest upwards of one million fish during a busy week. Speckled Trout follow a similar process with a few exceptions. They are smaller fish and the spawning tanks can hold between 20-30 adult fish. Speckled Trout spawn in the summer rather than in the fall so, the biologists adjust the timing of the tank's lighting and water temperature. To date, all three hatcheries combined have released over 1 billion fingerlings into the Texas bay systems. TPWD biologists have also confirmed that the fingerlings are surviving and becoming mature in these systems.

Southern Flounder

In 2006 Sea Center began experiments, trying to rear Southern Flounder in the hatcheries. “Flounder are significantly different in their spawning and early developmental stages,” Paul said. “It is only in the last 3-5 years that the team at Sea Center has been able to consistently harvest flounder for stocking because of three major challenges.

1. Flounder eat live prey as soon as they hatch. In 2018 Sea Center added a new flounder building to their campus. The building boasts fingerling tanks and rotifer culturing – tiny, near-microscopic animals for the larval flounder to eat. The Sea Center Flounder Kitchen can produce 1 billion rotifers a day. More than enough to double the size of the operation in a future expansion.
2. Before they become officially flat fish, they are extremely sensitive to any environmental changes, “They are much more fragile while they are going through a metamorphosis to a flat fish,” Paul said. “Once the flounder's eye rotates to the same side as the other it becomes officially a flat fish, and they are much hardier at that point.
3. Harvesting eggs is way more labor intensive. In captivity, flounder do not spawn as reliably as red drum and trout. Sea Center biologists must determine which female is ready to spawn and manually ‘strip spawn’ the eggs. This is done in a manner that does not harm the fish.

The flounder will live in the fry tanks for approximately 45 days before the flounder will leave the water column and become flat fish. During that time and a bit beyond it, the environmental conditions can change the sex of the fish from female to male. Sea Center and Texas A&M Galveston are currently conducting an experiment to determine at what point that occurs. “The females are bigger than the males. Once flounder reach the retention slot size they are most likely female,” Paul said. This means that right now recreational fishermen harvest a greater quantity of female fish than they do males. “We want to determine at what age and length that change can happen in flounder so we can stock more females,” Paul said. As production measures are improved, TPWD will adjust when and how they stock flounder in Texas. To date, the Sea Center and other Texas hatcheries have stocked over 1 million flounder in the bays.

Texas has gone from overfishing redfish to the point of near extinction in the late 1970s to becoming one of the best places in the Gulf for redfish because of the efforts of the TPWD and its partners. All fish involved in the program are retired after four years of service and released to an onsite pond or back to the bay. If you are interested in volunteering at the hatchery, check out the website https://tpwd.texas.gov/fishing/sea-center-texas/. You can also make your voice heard in the conservation efforts of TPWD by checking their website where they will announce scoping meetings for regulations and regulation proposals. If you can’t attend in person, you can take a survey and let them know what you think.